Our culture

At the heart of our approach is our company culture. We are working to make culture our ‘differentiator’ – it underpins both our Trust & Growth strategy and our employee value proposition (our People promise).

Alongside our values, we have identified three cultural attributes, vital to our success:

• Inclusive collaboration

• High performance

• Fast innovation

These attributes are built into our People processes, including performance reviews and decisions on promotions and variable pay. While values determine our behavior, these attributes define the way we behave and interact with each other. It is imperative that all partners and directors reflect and ‘live’ these attributes in their daily management.

To support our cultural attributes, we have defined a series of desired ‘behaviors’. In 2021/2022, we focused on two of these behaviors:

• Embracing an entrepreneurial, growth mindset that seeks opportunities – important if we are to continue to expand and innovate our business.

• Creating a safe work environment in which all our employees feel included – we believe this will improve well-being, and drive performance and innovation.

These two behaviors formed the basis for our cultural program over the past year, most notably with our new Psychological Safety initiative.

Inclusion, diversity and equity

In recent years, we have seen more focus in society on issues of equity and diversity. We are committed to showing leadership on these issues and adopting best practice.

We believe that building an inclusive work environment gives us access to the best talent and development opportunities, makes for better decision-making, and supports growth. At KPMG N.V., we see inclusion, diversity and equity (ID&E) as a business priority – that means we set clear targets and hold our leadership to account for performance.

Over the past year, we have pushed ahead with our inclusion, diversity and equity programs. We have made inclusive leadership and unconscious bias training mandatory for all partners and directors, and increased gender targets for our Supervisory Board and senior management. We also launched a Psychological Safety initiative to ensure employees feel included, and able to ask questions, make mistakes and challenge without fear of being marginalized or punished. In 2021/2022, 1 incident of discrimination was reported, compared with 0 the year before. The incident has been investigated and action was taken where appropriate.  

During the year, we also put further emphasis on employees’ health and well-being, creating an online platform that gives employees direct access to well-being coaches and a range of health, vitality and welfare programs. During the year, our absentee rate increased to 3.0%, up from 2.1% the year before, possibly a result of the continued effects of the Covid-19 pandemic[1].

Figures show % of men/women by headcount at 1 October 2022. Because promotions become effective as of 1 October, gender diversity is disclosed as of 1 October 2022.

• 1Please note legislation and GDPR precludes us from collecting data on the causes of absences or personal illness.

On gender diversity, we are continuing to make progress. In 2021/2022, women accounted for 44% of our intake, up from 42% the previous year. It is clear, however, that too many talented women leave as they advance in the organization. At the end of the year, women accounted for 20% of partners and directors, an improvement on the previous year, but still short of our 22% target. Unbiasing our processes will help us address this – as part of our overall ID&E program, we are also actively sponsoring women approaching promotion and endeavoring to increase the percentage of women candidates at intake. We also measure our gender pay gap: results from our latest assessment show that there is no significant pay gap. Women are, on average, slightly better paid than men within both partner/director and junior groups.

Gender pay gap